Steps to Eliminate Unconscious Bias

Confirmation bias happens when a person gives more weight to evidence that confirms their beliefs and undervalues evidence that could disprove it. People display this bias when they gather or recall information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way.

In most cases, biases form because of the human brain’s tendency to categorize new people and new information. To learn quickly, the brain connects new people or ideas to past experiences. Once the new thing has been put into a category, the brain responds to it the same way it does to other things in that category.

1. Learn what unconscious biases are.
2. Assess which biases are most likely to affect you.
3. Figure out where biases are likely to affect your company.
4. Modernize your approach to hiring.
5. Let data inform your decisions.
6. Bring diversity into your hiring decisions.

If you notice the following, the source may be biased:

1. Heavily opinionated or one-sided.
2. Relies on unsupported or unsubstantiated claims.
3. Presents highly selected facts that lean to a certain outcome.
4. Pretends to present facts, but offers only opinion.
5. Uses extreme or inappropriate language.

Implicit biases are influenced by experiences, although these attitudes may not be the result of direct personal experience. Cultural conditioning, media portrayals, and upbringing can all contribute to the implicit associations that people form about the members of other social groups.

Cognitive biases can affect your decision-making skills, limit your problem-solving abilities, hamper your career success, damage the reliability of your memories, challenge your ability to respond in crisis situations, increase anxiety and depression, and impair your relationships.

Confirmation bias is important because it may lead people to hold strongly to false beliefs or to give more weight to information that supports their beliefs than is warranted by the evidence. These factors may lead to risky decision making and lead people to overlook warning signs and other important information.

For example, after attending a baseball game, you might insist that you knew that the winning team was going to win beforehand. High school and college students often experience hindsight bias during the course of their studies. As they read their course texts, the information may seem easy.

First, the motivation to have a predictable world causes hindsight bias when observers watch decision makers. For example, moderately surprising outcomes violate people’s expectations and may trigger a negative state that people are motivated to reduce.

Some examples of cultural influences that may lead to bias include:

• Linguistic interpretation.
• Ethical concepts of right and wrong.
• Understanding of facts or evidence-based proof.
• Intentional or unintentional ethnic or racial bias.
• Religious beliefs or understanding.
• Sexual attraction and mating.

Hindsight bias is a term used in psychology to explain the tendency of people to overestimate their ability to have predicted an outcome that could not possibly have been predicted.

Hindsight bias is a psychological phenomenon that allows people to convince themselves after an event that they had accurately predicted it before it happened. This can lead people to conclude that they can accurately predict other events.

This article presents an interview with decision scientist Baruch Fischhoff, who pioneered research on the hindsight bias—the tendency to view an event as more predictable, inevitable or likely once it has taken place.

A self-serving bias is the common habit of a person taking credit for positive events or outcomes, but blaming outside factors for negative events. This can be affected by age, culture, clinical diagnosis, and more.

Psychologists have found that people have a tendency to rely too heavily on the very first piece of information they learn, which can have a serious impact on the decision they end up making. 1 In psychology, this type of cognitive bias is known as the anchoring bias or anchoring effect.

The anchoring effect is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered. During decision making, anchoring occurs when individuals use an initial piece of information to make subsequent judgments.